Brainstorm Health 2024: Bernard J. Tyson Memorial Award
Dr. Uché Blackstock Presented by: Denise Bradley-Tyson, Executive Chairperson, Bernard J. Tyson Impact Fund, American Heart Association Accepting Award: Dr. Uché Blackstock, Founder and CEO, Advancing Health Equity Moderator: Jennifer Fields, Fortune
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00:00 Now to what might be the most meaningful and inspirational part of this gathering.
00:04 Something the Brainstorm Health team cares deeply about deeply. The presentation of the Bernard J. Tyson Memorial Leadership Award.
00:12 The late Bernard Tyson, former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, was undeniably one of the most influential healthcare leaders of our time.
00:21 As a steadfast advocate for expanding healthcare access, Bernard worked tirelessly
00:27 towards ensuring that everyone has equal access to quality care.
00:30 His beliefs and actions showcased his strong conviction in the crucial role that social determinants play in health.
00:38 He recognized that improving the lives of others went beyond just medical interventions.
00:44 He was a strong advocate of looking at the whole picture,
00:48 importantly, an individual's social and economic conditions.
00:53 Bernard passed away in 2019, leaving behind an indelible legacy.
00:57 He was not only a visionary leader, but also a great friend to us at Fortune Brainstorm Health.
01:03 We're forever grateful for his contributions to our event and to the healthcare industry as a whole.
01:08 To celebrate his work and memory, Fortune created the Bernard J. Tyson Memorial Leadership Award,
01:14 bestowing it upon those who reflect Bernard's values and actions.
01:18 This is our fifth year
01:20 presenting the award and we're grateful to welcome back Executive Chairperson of Bernard J. Tyson Impact Fund at the American Heart Association,
01:28 Denise Bradley Tyson, who will do the honors. Denise, thank you for being with us. Please join me on stage.
01:46 Thank you very much, Jennifer, and I have to take a moment to thank the entire Fortune organization,
01:52 Fortune magazine organization, for having honored my late husband with this
01:56 prestigious award.
01:59 So it's a pleasure to join you once again this year to honor the work of my late husband and to continue his legacy.
02:07 Studies have shown that the richest Americans have a life expectancy
02:13 that's nearly or almost or probably more than, because you know, data can be a little fuzzy sometimes,
02:20 but it's at least 10 years higher than the poorest.
02:24 Where a person lives can predict the likelihood of their developing a chronic life-threatening condition.
02:32 I just heard from Dr. Michelle
02:34 Gordine from CVS on a panel earlier today say,
02:38 "For neighborhoods five miles apart, there can be at least a 20-year discrepancy in their life expectancy."
02:46 The life expectancy of black men is the shortest among all demographic groups, and
02:53 black women are more than two and a half times likely to die in childbirth than white women.
03:00 All of this points to what the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has said,
03:08 "Racism is a serious public health threat."
03:11 But there are those of us who've known that racism in health care and its connectivity
03:17 to the social determinants of health
03:20 has been sort of an open secret,
03:23 and I'm glad to see that there are more people in the industry who are getting woke to this fact and are now focusing on
03:31 addressing the social determinants of health as part of one's overall health and well-being and life expectancy.
03:38 My late husband was on a mission during his time on earth,
03:43 which for me was far too short.
03:46 He was a champion of combating the disparities that exist in the US health care system.
03:52 Now, many of you knew he was the chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente when he died,
03:57 and he had spent almost his entire career working in health care, mostly within the Kaiser Permanente
04:03 organization.
04:06 In order to continue to serve that mission,
04:08 we must do as Bernard did and focus on measurable, sustainable outcomes.
04:15 This year's recipient of the Bernard J. Tyson Memorial Leadership Award is
04:21 someone of like mind on a similar mission,
04:26 who I am honored to be asked to present the award to.
04:31 Dr. Uche
04:35 Blackstock is a founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity,
04:39 where she and her team advise health care organizations about ways to provide racially equitable care and
04:47 how to address factors contributing to racial health inequities.
04:53 Dr. Blackstock is also the author of the book
04:56 Legacy, A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine,
05:01 which takes a critical look at the intersection of racism and health care.
05:05 Her perspective on the US health care system comes from both her personal and professional experiences.
05:12 While studying at Harvard, Dr. Blackstock suffered a near-death medical emergency,
05:20 one she believes was unavoidable and
05:23 likely happened because she was a young black woman and her issues were not taken seriously.
05:30 That experience, coupled with her time working inside the health system as a physician,
05:38 helped reshape her view on health care in the United States.
05:42 She knew then
05:44 she needed to take urgent action.
05:48 We're going to hear more about Dr. Blackstock's journey and her book in just a moment,
05:53 but first it would be my distinct pleasure to recognize Dr. Blackstock for her work.
06:00 Dr. Blackstock, could you please join me on stage?
06:04 [Applause]
06:06 Thank you for being with us here today, Dr. Blackstock.
06:30 We would be honored if you would accept the Brainstorm Health Bernard J. Tyson Memorial Award
06:38 for your work to highlight and eradicate the deeply rooted
06:43 inequities that exist in health care and around access to health care.
06:48 We thank you and we offer our
06:52 sincerest congratulations.
06:55 Thank you so much. Thank you.
06:57 [Applause]
06:59 I am so incredibly honored by this award and
07:08 Dr. Bernard Tyson was an idol of mine, someone I respected for
07:14 such a long time, and so this is even much more of an honor, truly.
07:19 I am the second generation of Dr. Blackstock, so I stand up here
07:25 representing my mother, who was the original Dr. Blackstock,
07:28 who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, was a group in poverty, born to a single mom,
07:35 made her way to Brooklyn College and had a chemistry professor there who encouraged her to apply to medical school, and she did, and
07:43 she made it to Harvard Med School.
07:46 [Applause]
07:47 But after that, she came back to New York City.
07:50 She trained at Harlem Hospital and she worked in the very same neighborhood that she grew up in.
07:54 Caring for her family, friends, and neighbors, and this is what I wrote about my mom in in my book Legacy.
07:59 And so the legacy that I continue is a legacy that my mother taught me of always giving back to our communities,
08:07 right? We go to these prestigious institutions,
08:10 we take advantage of these experiences, and we come back and we work in service to our communities.
08:16 But it's also more on a systemic level of, you know, addressing these racial health inequities that have been around
08:22 way too long in our country. It's actually quite atrocious.
08:26 One of the richest countries in the world that we have, the statistics that we have, and
08:33 the work that I do is out of love, it's out of purpose,
08:37 it's because I think all of our patients deserve so much better,
08:42 and they deserve to live long full lives. I think everyone in this room would agree. So I'm so very proud to
08:49 accept this award in memory of Dr. Bernard Tyson, and I am
08:54 motivated even more to continue to do the health equity advocacy work that I do. Thank you so much.
09:00 [Applause]
09:19 Congratulations, Dr. Blackstock.
09:21 Thank you so much. As Denise mentioned, we'd like to take a few minutes to hear more about your work, your book, and your path forward.
09:28 There are so many really powerful and moving moments in your book.
09:35 Do I get to show the cover?
09:37 I love this cover! I'm so sorry, I just want to say, show the cover,
09:41 because the cover actually has a lot of different meanings. If you read the book, it's a stethoscope with different pieces to it,
09:48 and if you read the book, it deciphers what each of the pieces of the stethoscope mean.
09:52 So Dr. Blackstock, the OG Dr. Blackstock,
09:58 figures very largely in your book, and you write about this
10:01 moment when you realize that all of your mother's success was not really a story of exceptionalism,
10:07 but that she was actually a lucky person. She was the lucky one who made it through a system not designed for her.
10:14 Yeah, yeah, and I know that sort of
10:18 is opposite of the story, I think, that we love to tell,
10:22 especially in this country of like individual success, right?
10:26 But yes, my mom, I'm so incredibly proud of everything that she achieved.
10:32 She was class of '76 from Harvard Medical School and
10:36 really just had to overcome so many barriers just to get there. She was in the same class of one of Jackie Onassis'
10:42 relatives. One of her
10:45 classmates' father had won the Nobel Prize in Immunology, and here she was, her mom. Her mom's greatest achievement was getting her GED
10:51 while working full-time and raising six children, right? But what I recognize, thank you, thank you,
10:57 but what I recognize is that, like my mother, there were so many people from her neighborhood or neighborhoods like hers
11:05 that could have also ended up at Harvard Med School, you know, that they could have had,
11:11 if they had had different opportunities, right, they could have also ended up there. So for a very long time,
11:16 I did think she was exceptional. I still think she's exceptional,
11:20 but I also recognize that there were many more brilliant children that grew up in her neighborhood that could have also been,
11:27 you know, what we, what we stand, what we
11:30 say is successful, seem successful.
11:35 You also write about how the combination of the pandemic plus the Black Lives Matter
11:40 protests is when you finally came into your power and truth as a black physician and advocate.
11:47 Can you talk about how that, yeah, set you up to take the next steps?
11:51 Yeah, and so just so everyone knows the background,
11:53 I've been in academic medicine for most of my career for almost 10 years,
11:57 in emergency medicine doing, and I loved academics because it's a wonderful combination of patient care,
12:05 research, and, and
12:07 working with trainees,
12:09 medical students, and residents, and I really loved it. And it's the only thing I knew. My mother was in academics,
12:14 you know, only a certain percentage of physicians stay in academics. So I was like, this is what I want to do.
12:19 And I recognize that being in that environment as a black woman physician actually was really, I
12:26 felt really silenced. I felt very muzzled. I felt incredibly underappreciated.
12:32 I felt like what I was bringing to my department wasn't something that was very much respected or valued.
12:38 And at the time I felt very isolated because in my department
12:43 I really was like one of the only black faculty, or one of two.
12:46 And this is in the middle of New York City, one of the most diverse cities in the, in the, in the country.
12:52 And so I made this really difficult decision to leave academics.
12:56 And I said, I'm going to, I'm going to work on my company,
12:59 Advancing Health Equity, because I will be able to do the work I want to do in an authentic way.
13:03 I was still seeing patients and then the pandemic hit and
13:08 everything went sideways. And, but I stayed the course. I started writing about, I started writing op-eds
13:16 about what I was seeing. I actually wrote an op-ed before I left academic medicine in Stat News, as Nicholas St.
13:21 Flirt knows. I wrote an op-ed that ended up going viral about why black faculty leave academic medicine.
13:28 I got so many emails, so many text messages saying, thank you so much for saying what we couldn't say.
13:35 And so then I started writing about what I was seeing in the pandemic.
13:39 I literally wrote my first op-ed, my first op-ed about the pandemic before the end of March.
13:44 And that ended up being published in Scientific American.
13:48 But I felt it was very important to get
13:51 sort of a distress call out there that communities of color were going to be
13:56 disproportionately impacted because I already knew, I already knew that people with chronic diseases,
13:59 people who worked in public facing jobs, were going to be the most likely to be infected and hospitalized and die.
14:07 You also have at the end of the book all of these calls to action for various people
14:14 involved in health care, but also outside of health care.
14:18 And now you're sitting in a room full of people who are in health care, decision makers, policy makers.
14:23 I would love to hear what is the call to action for all of us.
14:27 Yeah, well, so many calls to actions, but I think the biggest, well, one of the biggest ones is really to understand,
14:34 and I know everyone's been talking about social determinants of health, but I don't think people understand
14:38 truly how, and I had to relearn this as a physician, that when I'm in the room with my patient,
14:46 it's not just the two of us. It is their employers. It's their family members.
14:50 It's the, you know, whether or not they're able to exercise in their neighborhood. Is it safe or not?
14:55 What kind of housing they live in? Are they exposed to lead? Like, literally all of those factors
15:01 impact how healthy my patients are. So only 20 percent, excuse me, only 20 percent of what I do actually matters.
15:09 80 percent, I have, I think I have no impact on. I actually should be aware of it as a clinician,
15:17 but there's 80 percent, 80 percent patients do not get to determine what happens.
15:23 They are systemic factors. So I think for everyone in this room, think about what role you have within your organizations.
15:30 What impact can you have on those systemic factors that contribute to how healthy people are?
15:36 To really have a broad understanding, and like
15:39 Denise Tyson said, this is not new, but it has not been integrated into how we care for patients.
15:47 And I think as for me as a physician, once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it.
15:52 And so now it's not enough just to write a prescription for a patient.
15:56 It's not enough to make sure someone has access to telehealth.
16:00 It is really a holistic way of understanding how we deliver the best care possible, and that we make sure
16:08 care is not just
16:10 available, but it's also accessible.
16:13 You also say really beautifully in your book, and also through some very harrowing examples, really demonstrate that racially
16:20 concordant care for black people is a matter of life and death.
16:23 And that's been, you know, the basis of so much of your work.
16:26 What is the answer to getting more, more racially concordant care?
16:31 And what I want to say also is that, yes,
16:33 racially concordant care where the clinician and the patient are the same racial background, it matters
16:38 especially for black people and people of color.
16:41 But that doesn't mean, I feel like, that means like I'm saying all other
16:45 physicians shouldn't know how to care about their patients.
16:48 No, we want everyone to be educated and trained to be care of, to take care of everybody.
16:52 However, I do think that we need special attention to the pipeline.
16:58 I talked about the Flexner Report and how it led to the closure of black medical schools.
17:02 Xavier University just mentioned that they're opening a new medical school. It will take about two to three years
17:08 for that medical school to open. But what's important to recognize is historically black medical schools still account for
17:14 graduating the most black physicians. And there are only a handful of them. There are less than five.
17:19 So what are the other medical schools doing?
17:23 It's a great question. I'm sorry we have to stop there, but thank you so much. Congratulations again.
17:28 Thank you. Thank you for writing your book. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you.
17:32 [end]
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